Here is an interesting read that was emailed to me from a reader with a strong Nietschean and Psychoanalytic background.... I don't entirely support the logic of the writer -- Norman Brown, a very provocative Psychoanalytic writer from the 1960s. I find him to be a little too strong in his 'Dionysian extremism'....like Nietzsche after 'The Birth of Tragedy' (BT) when Nietzsche basically abandoned Apollo and rode his Dionysian horse for the rest of his writing career...
I will offer some discussion afterwards...
Here is the Norman Brown piece...
Thank you Trevor Pederson for bringing my attention to it -- and the writer.
-- dgb, July 27th, 2010
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Brown, N.O. (1960). Adventures in Ideas: Apollo and Dionysus. Psychoanal. Rev., 47A:3-23.
(1960). Psychoanalytic Review, 47A:3-23
Adventures in Ideas: Apollo and Dionysus
Norman O. Brown
A sound instinct made Freud keep the term “sublimation,” with its age-old religious and poetical connotations. Sublimation is the use made of bodily energy by a soul which sets itself apart from the body; it is a “lifting up of the soul or its Faculties above Matter” (Swift's definition of religious enthusiasm). 1 “Writing poetry,” says Spender, “is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the balance of body and mind.” 2 “Mathematics,” says Bertrand Russell, “rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without any appeal to our weaker nature… The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.” 3 And, like the doctrine of a soul distinct from the body, sublimation, as an attempt to be more than man, aims at immortality. “I shall not altogether die,” says Horace: “my sublimations will exalt me to the stars (sublimi feriam sidera vertice).”
Sublimation thus rests upon mind-body dualism, not as a philosophical doctrine but as a psychic fact implicit in the behavior of sublimators, no matter what their conscious philosophy may be. Hence Plato remains the truest philosopher, since he defined philosophy as sublimation and correctly articulated as its goal the elevation of Spirit
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From Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, by Norman O. Brown. Copyright $$ 1959 by Wesleyan University. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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above Matter. But, as Frazer showed, the doctrine of the external or separable soul is as old as humanity itself. 4
The original sublimator, the historical ancestor of philosopher and prophet and poet, is the primitive shaman, with his techniques for ecstatic departure from the body, soul-levitation, soul-transmigration, and celestial navigation. The history of sublimation has yet to be written, but from Cornford's pioneering work it is evident that Platonism, and hence all Western philosophy, is civilized shamanism —a continuation of the shamanistic quest for a higher mode of being —by new methods adapted to the requirements of urban life. The intermediate links are Pythagoras, with his soul-transmigrations, and Parmenides, the great rationalist whose rationalistic vision was vouchsafed to him by the goddess after a ride through the sky to the Palace of Night. 5The discovery of the shamanistic origins connects the historical investigation of Western philosophy with the psychoanalytical investigation. The shaman is far enough from us so that we can recognize that he is, to put it mildly, a little mad; and, as we have seen, psychoanalysis discerns an intrinsic insanity in sublimation. “Pure intelligence,” says Ferenczi, “is in principle madness.” 6
The aim of psychoanalysis—still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious—is to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation. Hence since sublimation is the essential activity of soul divorced from body, psychoanalysis must return our sublimations to our bodies; and conversely, sublimation cannot be understood unless we understand the nature of the soul—in psychoanalytical terminology, the nature of the ego. Sublimation is the “ego-syntonic” way of disposing of libido. The deflection of libido from its original aim in sublimation is a deflection caused by the influence of the ego; the desexualization is the consequence of passing through the crucible of the ego. Sexual energy is bodily energy, and the desexualized is disembodied energy, or energy made soulful. Technically, therefore, we can ascribe the backwardness of the theory of sublimation to the backwardness of the psychoanalytical theory of the ego; but the backwardness of the psychoanalytical theory of the ego is really due to an existential factor —a hesitation to break with the great Western tradition of sublimation and the soul-body dualism on which it is based.
What orthodox psychoanalysis has in fact done is to re-introduce the soul-body dualism in its own new lingo, by hypostatizing the
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“ego” into a substantial essence which by means of “defense mechanisms” continues to do battle against the “id.” Sublimation is disposed of by listing it as a “successful” defense mechanism. 7 In substantializing the ego, orthodox psychoanalysis follows the authority of Freud, who compared the relation of the ego to the id to that of a rider to his horse 8—a metaphor going back to Plato's Phaedrus and perpetuating the Platonic dualism. But Freud's genius always somewhere transcends itself. The proper starting point is his formula in The Ego and the Id: “The ego is first and foremost a body-ego,” “the mental projection of the surface of the body,” 9 originating in the perceptual system, and, like the perceptual system, having the function of mediating between the body and other bodies in the environment. If we can come to understand how that body-ego becomes a soul distinct from a body, we shall understand sublimation; and, by the same token, we shall understand the conditions under which the soul can recover its natural function and be again a body-ego.
At the beginning of The Ego and the Id Freud says, “The ego has the task of bringing the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle which reigns supreme in the id… The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.” 10 The passage suggests that the force which constitutes the essence of the ego, and which it applies when it influences the id, is simply the reality-principle. In other words, the ego is simply a transparent medium between the id and the environment, and the force which causes repression and sublimation is out there in the environment.
This naïve equation of the ego and the reality-principle (and of repression and external reality) disappears from Freud's later writings, but not from the textbooks of psychoanalysis. Thus Fenichel: “The origin of the ego and the origin of the sense of reality are but two aspects of one developmental step.”11 The truth of the matter, according to Freud's later theory, is that the peculiar structure of the human ego results from its incapacity to accept reality, specifically the supreme reality of death and separation. The real achievement of The Ego and the Id is the pioneering effort to make an instinctual analysis of the ego, to see what the ego does with Eros and Death. And in that analysis the point of departure for the human ego is death not accepted, or separation (from the environment, i.e., the mother)
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not accepted, or, in Freud's preferred terminology, object-loss not accepted.
The ego, to be sure, must always mediate between external reality and the id; but the human ego, not strong enough to accept the reality of death, can perform this mediating function only on condition of developing a certain opacity protecting the organism from reality. The way the human organism protects itself from the reality of living-and-dying is, ironically, by initiating a more active form of dying, and this more active form of dying is negation. The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body. As we saw in a previous chapter, this negative posture blossoms into negation of self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression). But negation, as the dialectical logicians recognize, and as Freud himself came to recognize when he wrote the essay “On Negation,” is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted affirmation of what is officially denied. To quote Freud: 12
Thus the subject-matter of a repressed image or thought can make its way into consciousness on condition that it is denied. Negation is a way of taking account of what is repressed; indeed, it is actually a removal of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed… Negation only assists in undoing one of the consequences of repression—namely the fact that the subject-matter of the image in question is unable to enter consciousness. The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the repression persists.
It is thus a general law of the ego not strong enough to die, and therefore not strong enough to live, that its consciousness of both its own inner world and the external world is sealed with the sign of negation; 13 and through negation life and death are diluted to the point that we can bear them. “The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed, though in all essentials the repression persists.” This dilution of life is desexualization. In other words, sublimation must be understood in the light of Freud's essay “On Negation.” Sublimations, as desexualizations, are not really deflections (changes of aim) of bodily Eros, but negations. Here again it becomes apparent that psychoanalysis, if it is to break through the barrier of repression, must break through the logic of simple
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negation, which is the logic of repression, and adopt a dialectical logic. The mode in which higher sublimations are connected with the lower regions of the body (as postulated by psychoanalytical theory) is the dialectical affirmation-by-negation. It is by being the negation of excrement that money is excrement; and it is by being the negation of the body (the soul) that the ego remains a body-ego.
The negative orientation of the human ego is inseparable from its involuted narcissism; both are consequences of separation not accepted. The point of departure for the human ego is object-loss: in fact, Freud once defined “the process of repression proper” as consisting in “a detachment of the libido from people—and things— that were previously loved.” 14 But the object-loss is not accepted. To quote from The Ego and the Id again: “When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues a modification in his ego which can only be described as a reinstatement of the object within the ego.” 15 That is to say, the object is not “lost,” but has to be actively negated, and, by the dialectical principle of affirmation-by-negation, the object is still affirmed (the identification). Thus, as a result of object-loss not accepted, the natural self-love of the organism is transformed into the vain project of being both Self and Other, and this project supplies the human ego with its essential energy. When the beloved (parental) object is lost, the love that went out to it is redirected to the self; but since the loss of the beloved object is not accepted, the human ego is able to redirect the human libido to itself only by deluding the libido by representing itself as identical with the lost object. In Freud's words, “When the ego assumes the features of the object, it forces itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and tries to make good the loss of that object by saying, ‘Look, I am so like the object, you can as well love me.’” 16 In technical Freudian terms, an identification replaces object-love, and by means of such identifications object-libido is transformed into narcissistic libido.
According to The Ego and the Id, the reservoir of narcissistic libido thus formed constitutes a store of “desexualized, neutral, dis-placeable energy” at the disposal of the ego, and it is this energy which is redirected outward to reality again in the form of sublimations. 17 Thus desexualization is an intrinsic character not just of sublimations, but of the energy constituting the ego, and this desexualization is the consequence of substituting for bodily erotic union with
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the world the vain, shadowy project of having the world within the self. To quote Freud, “The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a process of desexualization; it is consequently a kind of sublimation.” 18 Thus the soul is the shadowy substitute for a bodily relation to other bodies.
The lost objects reinstated in the human ego are past objects; the narcissistic orientation of the human ego is inseparable from its regressive orientation, and both are produced by the dialectic of negation. The separation in the present is denied by reactivating fantasies of past union, and thus the ego interposes the shadow of the past between itself and the full reality of life and death in the present. What we call “character” is this shell imprisoning the ego in the past: “The character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.” 19 What we call “conscience” perpetuates inside of us our bondage to past objects now part of ourselves: the super-ego “unites in itself the influences of the present and the past. In the emergence of the super-ego we have before us, as it were, an example of the way in which the present is changed into the past.” 20
The regressive orientation keeps not only our moral personality (character, conscience) in bondage to the past, but also our cognitive faculty—in Freudian terminology, the ego's function of testing reality. The human ego, in its cognitive function, is no transparent mirror transmitting the reality-principle to the id; it has a more active, and distorting, role consequent upon its incapacity to bear the reality of life in the present. The starting point for the human form of cognitive activity is loss of a loved reality: “The essential precondition for the institution of the function of testing reality is that objects shall have been lost which have formerly afforded real satisfaction.” 21 But the lost objects are retained and are what the cognitive ego is looking for, so that human consciousness has essentially an anamnestic aim. To quote again the essay “On Negation”: 22
It is now no longer a question of whether something perceived (a thing) shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is present in the ego as an image can also be rediscovered in perception (that is, reality)… Thus the first and immediate aim of the process of testing reality is not to discover an object in real perception corresponding to what is imagined, but to rediscover such an object.
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More generally, as stated in The Interpretation of Dreams: All thinking is nothing but a detour, departing from the memory of a gratification and following byways till it reaches the cathexis (Freud's word) of the identical memory, now reached by the path of motor action. 23 Despite Freud's formula about substituting the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle of the id, the ego does not abolish the pleasure-principle, but derives from it the energy sustaining its exploration of reality. Thus his fundamental theorem about the human libido—every object-finding is in reality a refinding 24—is true of consciousness as well. Hence also human consciousness is inseparable from an active attempt to alter reality, so as to “regain the lost objects.” 25 The reality which the ego thus constructs and perceives is culture; and culture, like sublimation (or neurosis) has the essential quality of being a “substitute-gratification,” a pale imitation of past pleasure substituting for present pleasure, and thus essentially desexualized.
The more specific and concrete mechanism whereby the body-ego becomes a soul is fantasy. Fantasy may be defined as a hallucination which cathects the memory of gratification; 26 it is of the same structure as the dream, and has the same relation to the id and to instinctual reality as the dream. Fantasy and dreaming do not present, much less satisfy, the instinctual demands of the id, which is of the body and seeks bodily erotic union with the world; they are essentially, like neurosis, “substitute gratifications.”
Fantasy is essentially regressive; it is not just a memory, but the hallucinatory reanimation of memory, a mode of self-delusion substituting the past for the present—or rather, by negation identifying past and present. In fact, this “hallucinatory cathexis of the memory of a gratification” alone makes possible the primal act of negation, and constitutes the hidden affirmative content behind every formal negation (including repression). It is through fantasy that the ego introjects lost objects and makes identifications. Identifications, as modes of preserving past object-cathexes and thus darkening life in the present with the shadow of the past, are fantasies. Identifications as modes of installing the Other inside the Self are fantasies. Identifications, as masks worn by the ego to substitute itself for reality and endear itself to the id, are fantasies. By the same token, fantasies are those images already present in the ego which the ego in its cognitive function is seeking to rediscover in reality.
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Fantasy, according to The Interpretation of Dreams, is the product of the primary process, the human organism's first solution to the problem of frustration, and the raw material for the secondary process in which the excitation arising from the need-stimulus is led through a detour, ending in voluntary motor action so as to change the real world and produce in it the real perception of the gratifying object. 27 Isaacs, who is one of the heretics in British psychoanalysis, is, despite the opposition of that stalwart defender of orthodoxy, Edward Glover, only carrying forward the thought of the later Freud when she says that “reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting unconscious phantasies.” 28 Fantasy is also the mechanism whereby the ego constructs the pregenital and genital sexual organizations. Again we follow Isaacs, who says that fantasy has the power to alter the body. 29 Perhaps we can say that since life is of the body, fantasy as the negation of life must negate specific bodily organs, so that there can be no fantasy without negation-alteration of the body.
As we saw in a previous chapter, the pregenital and genital organizations are constituted by regressive fantasies of union with the mother, attached to the specific organs where the infantile drama of separation is enacted. For example, the prototype of all “transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido,” and therefore the prototype of all sublimation (and probably the most satisfactory of all sublimations), is infantile thumb-sucking, in which, with the aid of fantasy or dream of union with the mother, the child makes himself into both himself and his mother's breast. Altogether, therefore, the world of fantasy is that opaque shield with which the ego protects himself from reality and through which the ego sees reality; it is by living in a world of fantasy that we lead a desexualized life. In sublimation the erotic component, what is projected is these infantile fantasies, not the reality of the id. Sublimation is the continuation not of infantile sexuality but of infantile dreaming; it comes to the same thing to say that what is sublimated is infantile sexuality not as polymorphously perverse, but as organized by fantasies into the sexual organizations.
“As long as man is suckled at a woman's breast,” says Anatole France, “he will be consecrated in the temple and initiated into some mystery of the divine. He will have his dream.” 30 Culture, therefore, the product of sublimation, is, in Plato's words, the imitation of an
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imitation; in Pindar's words, the shadow of a dream.
Fantasy is the clue to the human neurosis and a crux in psychoanalytical theory. Freud himself was somewhat equivocal on the question whether the ultimate pathogenic material in the human psyche was actual experience or fantasy. As late as 1918 he said that “this is the most ticklish question in the whole domain of psychoanalysis.” 31 But it was a turning point in Freud's early career when he discovered that the buried cause of neurosis was not an actual event (for example, seduction in childhood) but fantasies: 32
One must never allow oneself to be misled into applying to the repressed creations of the mind the standards of reality; this might result in undervaluing the importance of phantasies in symptom-formation on the ground that they are not actualities; or in deriving a neurotic sense of guilt from another source because there is no proof of actual committal of any crime. One is bound to employ the currency that prevails in the country one is exploring; in our case it is the neurotic currency.
The neurotic currency is wishes and thoughts, given reality in magic and in neurosis by the narcissistic principle of the omnipotence of thought. Hence Freud can say, “It is not really a decisive matter whether one has killed one's father or abstained from the deed; one must feel guilty in either case”; and “It is not primarily a matter of whether castration is really performed: what is important is that the boy believes in it.” 33 Hence more generally neurotic symptoms derive not from the facts of infantile sexual life but from the fantastic theories of sexuality developed by children, and expressing the narcissistic wish to be the father of oneself. In fact it is the efflorescence of fantasy in infantile sexuality that necessitates the final catastrophic repression. Infantile sexuality is doomed because “its wishes are incompatible with reality” and it “has no real aim.” 34
Self-styled materialists argue that Freud, in turning from the memory of a real event to fantasy as the cause of neurosis, made a fatal “repudiation of life-experience” and “transition to unabashed idealism.” 35 The “repudiation of life experience” and “unabashed idealism” are not Freud's, but humanity's. The recognition that we are all in practice idealists, alienated from our bodies and pursuing, like infantile sexuality itself, “no real aim,” is the precondition for overcoming, in reality as well as in theory, the mind-body dualism. The real nature of the primal fantasies is revealed by the fact that they cannot be remembered, but only re-enacted. They exist only as
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a neurotic way of acting in the present, and only as long as the ego perpetuates the infantile flight from life-and-death and the infantile fantasy-substitutes for the reality of living-and-dying. Or to put it another way, they do not exist in memory or in the past, but only as hallucinations in the present, which have no meaning except as negations of the present.
In his later writings Freud repeats that “hysterical symptoms spring from phantasies, and not from real events,” 36 but his interpretation of the “phylogenetic factor” or the “archaic heritage”— i.e., the factor not traceable to individual experience—in the etiology of neurosis causes fresh difficulties. He says that “all we can find in the prehistory of neurosis is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.” 37 It is plain from the quotation that the “phylogenetic” element is the same as the element of fantasy; the term “phylogenetic experience” really means that Freud is deriving the element in fantasy not derivable from real events in the history of the individual from real events in the history of the human race. Thus Freud's concept of the “archaic heritage” makes fantasy a real memory once more, only now it is “memory-traces of the experience of former generations.” 38
This line of thought makes the Primal Father and the Primal Crime real historical events—real historical events which constitute the ultimate pathogenic material in the human psyche. But in an earlier chapter we argued that psychoanalysis breaks down if it has to explain neurosis by invoking history instead of explaining history as neurosis, and that the Primal Crime is a myth, a fantasy. It still remains true that each one of us is suffering from the trauma of becoming human, a trauma first enacted in the Ice Age and re-enacted in every individual born in the human family. But the legacy of the trauma is not an objective burden of guilt transmitted by an objective inheritance of acquired characteristics—as Freud actually postulated 39—and imposing repression in the organism from outside and from the past, but a fantasy of guilt perpetually reproduced by the ego so that the organism can repress itself. Freud's myth of the Primal Crime still asserts the reality of the fantasy, and still maintains the repression; but an ego strong enough to live would no longer need to hallucinate its way out of life, would need no fantasies, and would have no guilt.
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Fantasy, as a hallucination of what is not there dialectically negating what is there, confers on reality a hidden level of meaning, and lends a symbolical quality to all experience. The animal symbolicum (Cassirer's definition of man) is animal sublimans, committed to substitute symbolical gratification of instincts for real gratification, the desexualized animal. By the same token the animal symbolicum is the animal which has lost its world and life, and which preserves in its symbol systems a map of the lost reality, guiding the search to recover it. Thus, as Ferenczi said, the tendency to rediscover what is loved in all the things of the hostile outer world is the primitive source of symbolism. And Freud's analysis of words as a halfway house on the road back to things discloses the substitutive and provisional status of the life of symbolic satisfactions. Sublimations satisfy the instincts to the same degree as maps satisfy the desire to travel. 40 The animal symbolicum is man enacting fantasies, man still unable to find a path to real instinctual gratification, and therefore still caught in the dream solution discovered in infancy. Already in the construction of the infantile sexual organizations fantasy confers symbolical meaning on particular parts of the child's own body. In the oral phase the dream of union with the mother is supported by thumb-sucking, and in thumb-sucking the thumb is a symbolic breast. Similarly the anal organization involves the symbolic manipulation of feces. When infantile sexuality comes to its castastrophic end with the castration complex, the child, as Freud says, gives up the body but not the fantasies. 41 Nonbodily cultural objects (sublimations) inherit the fantasies, and thus man in culture, Homo sublimans, is man dreaming while awake (Charles Lamb's definition of the poet). 42 LaBarres' epigram expresses the literal truth: “A dollar is a solemn Sir Roger de Coverley dance, a codified psychosis normal in one subspecies of this animal, an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once.” 43
Sublimation perpetuates the negative, narcissistic, and regressive solution of the infantile ego to the problem of disposing of life and death—in a word, it perpetuates the infantile dream—and yet there is a difference between sublimations and the infantile sexual organizations out of which they arise and which they perpetuate. After the castration complex the ego loses the body but keeps the fantasies. But in losing the body, the ego must in some sense lose the fantasies too (hence Freud speaks of the total abrogation of the Oedipus complex).
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Fantasies, like everything else, exist only in the present, as hallucinations in the present, and must be attached to objects in the present. According to psychoanalytical theory, after their detachment from the body (in Freud's blunt style, after masturbation is given up) they are projected into reality, forming that opaque medium called culture, through which we apprehend and manipulate reality.
How is this projection effected, and what is its significance? The answer is contained in Freud's late studies of denial, specifically fetishism as the result of denial. Starting from the castration complex, Freud shows that the fact of sexual differentiation both is and is not accepted, or rather that the fact of sexual differentiation from the mother is accepted only at the cost of finding in some other external object a symbolic substitute for the penis, “a compromise formed with the aid of displacement, such as we have been familiar with in dreams.” 44 Sublimations are formed out of infantile sexuality by the mechanism of fetishism; sublimations are denials or negations of the fantasies of infantile sexuality, and affirm them in the mode of affirmation by negation. The original fantasies are negations; sublimations are negations of negations. The original activity of the infantile sexual organizations was symbolic; sublimations are symbols of symbols. Thus sublimation is a second and higher level of desexualization; the life in culture is the shadow of a dream.
It is this second level of desexualization or negation that gives us a soul distinct from the body. Freud points out that the simultaneous acceptance and denial in fetishism involves a split in the ego. 45 Of course there is a split inherent in the ego from the start by virtue of its origin in a trauma of separation not accepted and denied by fantasy. As Ferenczi says, “There is neither shock nor fright without some trace of splitting of personality … part of the person regresses into a state of happiness that existed prior to the trauma—a trauma which it endeavours to annul.” 46 But while the infantile bodyego works out compromises between its soul (i.e., fantasies) and its body (the infantile sexual organizations), and, as Freud said, the child remains its own ideal, 47 the adult body-ego, as structured by the castration complex, has to break itself in two because it is called upon to choose between body and soul; it cannot abandon the body, and is not strong enough to give up the soul. By a process of “narcissistic self-splitting” the ego is divorced from the super-ego: the whole stratum of abandoned object-cathexes (identifications) which form
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its own character becomes unconscious; and, in Schilder's terminology, the intellectual ego is split from the body-ego. 48
But the ego cannot get rid of the body: it can only negate it, and by negating it, dialectically affirm it. Hence all symbolism, even in the highest flights of sublimation, remains body symbolism. “The derisive remark was once made against psychoanalysis,” says Ferenczi, “that the unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and a vagina or anus in every concave one. I find that this sentence well characterizes the facts.” 49 Infantile sexuality (in the infantile sexual organizations) negates the world and attempts to make a world out of its own body. Sublimation negates the body of childhood and seeks to construct the lost body of childhood in the external world. Infantile sexuality is an autoplastic compensation for the loss of the Other; sublimation is an alloplastic compensation for the loss of Self.
Hence the hidden aims of sublimation and the cultural process is the progressive discovery of the lost body of childhood. As we saw in the last chapter, the repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into an external perception, by being projected. According to Freud, the mythological conception of the universe, which survives even in the most modern religions, is only psychology projected onto the outer world. 50 Not just mythology but the entirety of culture is projection. In the words of Spender, “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.” 51
The first breakthrough of the insight which flowers into psychoanalysis occurs in German idealism, in Hegel's notion of the world as the creation of spirit and, even, more, in Novalis' notion of the world as the creation of the magic power of fantasy. In fact, there is a certain loss of insight reflected in the tendency of psychoanalysis to isolate the individual from culture. Once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch, or rather, once we recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture, it becomes plain that there is nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze except these projections—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—and thus psychoanalysis fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis. It also follows that consciousness of the repressed unconscious is itself a cultural and historical product, since the repressed unconscious can become conscious only by being transformed into an external perception in the form of a cultural projection.
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Cultures therefore differ from each other not in the content of the repressed—which consists always in the archetypical fantasies generated by the universal nature of human infancy—but in the various kinds and levels of the return of the repressed in projections made possible by various kinds and levels of environment, technology, etc. Hence those psychoanalytically minded anthropologists who attempt to explain the varieties of culture from the variable actualities of infant-rearing practices are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. The pathogenic material in culture, as in the individual, is not the real experience of childhood, but fantasy. Hence, on the other hand, psychoanalysis, as a new and higher mode of consciousness of the unconscious, was made possible by the industrial revolution and its new revelation, or projection, of human psychology. Psychoanalysis is part of the romantic reaction.
Sublimation is the search for lost life; it presupposes and perpetuates the loss of life and cannot be the mode in which life itself is lived. Sublimation is the mode of an organism which must discover life rather than live, must know rather than be. As a result of its origin in object-loss (first loss of the Other, then loss of Self) human consciousness (the ego) is burdened not only with a repressive function distinguishing men from other animals, but also with a cognitive function distinguishing men from animals. The human consciousness, in addition to the function of exploring the outside world, is burdened with the additional task of discovering the sequestered inner world. The result is an inevitable distortion of both the outer and the inner world. Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies, must distort the external world. In Freud's words, the boy saves his own penis at the cost of giving the lie to reality. 52 Projections bring the inner world to consciousness only under the general sign of negation or alienation; their relation to the inner world must be denied. Sublimation perpetuates the incapacity of the infantile ego to bear the full reality of living and dying, and continues the infantile mechanism (fantasy) for diluting (desexualizing) experience to the point where we can bear it. From the psychology of dreams Freud derived the basic law that the conscious system (the “secondary process”) can cathect an idea only when it is able to inhibit any pain that may arise from that idea.53 Sublimation inhibits pain by keeping experience at a distance and interposing a veil between consciousness and life. We project, says Freud, only those
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things about which we do not know and do not want to know, 54 so that we can know without knowing all. Again quoting Freud: 55
To be thus able not only to recognize, but at the same time to rid himself of, reality is of great value to the individual, and he would wish to be equipped with a similar weapon against the often merciless claims of his instincts. That is why he takes such pains to project, i.e., to transfer outwards, all that becomes troublesome to him from within …
A particular way is adopted of dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes.
The basic mechanism for producing this desexualization of life, this holding of life at a distance, is, as we have seen, negation; sublimation is life entering consciousness on condition that it is denied. The negative moment in sublimation is plain in the inseparable connection between symbolism (in language, science, religion, and art) and abstraction. Abstraction, as Whitehead has taught us, is a denial of the living organ of experience, the living body as a whole; 56 in Freud's words, “Subordinating sense-perception to an abstract idea was a triumph of spirituality [Geistigkeit] over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.” 57 The dialectic of negation and alienation appears in the history of the sublimating consciousness as a law of ever increasing abstraction. Our deepest knowledge of ourselves is attained only on condition of the higher abstraction. Abstraction, as a mode of keeping life at a distance, is supported by that negation of the “lower” infantile sexual organizations which effects a general “displacement from below upwards” of organ eroticism to the head, especially to the eyes: 58 Os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre jussit. The audiovisual sphere is preferred by sublimation because it preserves distance; the incest taboo in effect says you may enjoy your mother only by looking at her from a distance. 59 Whitehead too has criticized as a form of abstraction the restriction of cognition to “a few definite avenues of communication with the external world … preferably the eyes.” 60 As life restricted to the seen, and by hallucinatory
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projection seen at a distance, and veiled by negation and distorted by symbolism, sublimation perpetuates and elaborates the infantile solution, the dream.
If the mechanism of sublimation is the dream, the instinctual economy which sustains it is a primacy of death over life in the ego. The path which leads from infantile dreaming to sublimation originates in the ego's incapacity to accept the death of separation, and its inauguration of those morbid forms of dying—negation, repression, and narcissistic involution. The end result is to substitute for the reality of living-and-dying the desexualized or deadened life. This conclusion, so shattering to the hope of finding in sublimation a “way out”—and therefore omitted in the encyclopedias of psychoanalytical orthodoxy—is squarely faced and stated by Freud in The Ego and the Id: “By thus obtaining possession of the libido from the objectcathexes, setting itself up as the love-object, and desexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual trends.” 61
And since the dialectic of sublimation in civilization is cumulative, cumulatively abstract and cumulatively deadening, Freud's intuition that civilization moves toward the primacy of intellect and the atrophy of sexuality is correct. 62 At the end of the road is pure intelligence, and, in the aphoristic formula of Ferenczi, “Pure intelligence is a product of dying, or at least of becoming mentally insensitive.” 63 But, as Freud also stated in The Ego and the Id, this solution disrupts the harmony between the two instincts, resulting in a “defusion of Eros into aggressiveness”: “After sublimation the erotic component no longer has the power to bind the whole of the destructive elements that were previously combined with it, and these are released in the form of inclinations to aggression and destruction.” 64 Thus the path of cumulative sublimation is also the path of cumulative aggression and guilt, aggression being the revolt of the baffled instincts against the desexualized and inadequate world, and guilt being the revolt against the desexualized and inadequate self.
If there is a “way out” from the dialectic of cumulative repression, guilt, and aggression, it must lie not in sublimation but in an alternative to sublimation. To understand our present predicament we have to go back to its origins, to the beginning of Western civilization and to the Greeks, who taught and still teach how to sublimate,
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and who worshiped the god of sublimation, Apollo. Apollo is the god of form—of plastic form in art, of rational form in thought, of civilized form in life. But the Apollonian form is form as the negation of instinct. “Nothing too much,” says the Delphic wisdom; “Observe the limit, fear authority, bow before the divine.” Hence Apollonian form is form negating matter, immortal form; that is to say, by the irony that overtakes all flight from death, deathly form. Thus Plato, as well as his shamanistic predecessors Abaris and Aristeas, is a son of Apollo. Apollo is masculine; but, as Bachofen saw, his masculinity is the symbolical (or negative) masculinity of spirituality. Hence he is also the god who sustains “displacement from below upward,” who gave man a head sublime and told him to look at the stars. Hence his is the world of sunlight, not as nature symbol but as a sexual symbol of sublimation and of that sunlike eye which perceives but does not taste, which always keeps a distance, like Apollo himself, the Far-Darter. And, as Nietzsche divined, the stuff of which the Apollonian world is made is the dream. Apollo rules over the fair world of appearance as a projection of the inner world of fantasy; and the limit which he must observe, “that delicate boundary which the dream-picture must not overstep,” 65 is the boundary of repression separating the dream from instinctual reality.
But the Greeks, who gave up Apollo, also gave us the alternative, Nietzsche's Dionysus. Dionysus is not dream but drunkenness, not life kept at a distance and seen through a veil but life complete and immediate. Hence, says Nietzsche, “The entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement” 66 (Rilke's “natural speech by means of the body” 67). The Dionysian “is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.” 68 Hence Dionysus does not observe the limit, but overflows; for him the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Nietzsche says that those who suffer from an overfullness of life want a Dionysian art. 69 Hence he does not negate any more. This, says, Nietzsche, is the essence of the Dionysian faith. 70 Instead of negating, he affirms the dialectical unity of the great instinctual opposites: Dionysus reunifies male and female, Self and Other, life and death. 71 Dionysus is the image of the instinctual reality which psychoanalysis will find the other side of the veil. Freud saw that in the id there is no negation, only affirmation and eternity. In an earlier chapter we
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saw that the reality from which the neurotic animal flees in vain is the unity of life and death. In this chapter we have seen the dreams of infantile sexuality and of Apollonian sublimation are not, are negations of, the instinctual reality. The instinctual reality is Dionysian drunkenness; in Freud's words, “We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.” 72
The human ego must face the Dionysian reality, and therefore a great work of self-transformation lies ahead of it. For Nietzsche was right in saying that the Apollonian preserves, the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness. As long as the structure of the ego is Apollonian, Dionysian experience can only be bought at the price of egodissolution. Nor can the issue be resolved by a “synthesis” of the Apollonian and the Dionysian; the problem is the construction of a Dionysian ego. Hence the later Nietzsche preaches Dionysus, and to see in this Dionysus a synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus is to sacrifice insight for peace of mind. Not only does Dionysus without the Dionyian ego threaten us with dissolution of consciousness; he also threatens us with that “genuine witches' brew,” “that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty (Nietzsche again 73), which is the revolt of the Dionysian against the Apollonian, and an ambivalent mixture, but no fusion, between the instinctual opposites.
Since we are dealing with bodily realities, not abstract intellectual principles, it is well to listen to one who knew not only the life of the mind, but also the life of the body and the art of the body as we do not—Isadora Duncan, who tells how she experienced the Dionysian ecstasy as “the defeat of the intelligence,” “the final convulsion and sinking down into nothingness that often leads to the gravest disasters—for the intelligence and the spirit.” 74 But her Dionysian ecstasy is the orgasm—that one moment, she says, worth more and more desirable than all else in the universe. The Dionysian ego would be freed from genital organization and of that necessity of “ridding the organism of sexual cravings and concentrating these in the genital” (Ferenczi 75). While the Apollonian ego is the ego of genital organization, the Dionysian ego would be once more a body-ego and would not have to be dissolved in body-rapture.
The work of constructing a Dionysian ego is immense; but there are signs that it is already under way. If we can discern the Dionysian witches' brew in the upheavals of modern history—in the sexology of
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de Sade and the politics of Hitler—we can also discern in the romantic reaction the entry of Dionysus into consciousness. It was Blake who said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Hegel was able to see the dialectic of reality as “the bacchanalian revel, in which no member is not drunk.”76 And the heirs of the romantics are Nietzsche and Freud. The only alternative to the witches' brew is psychoanalytical consciousness, which is not the Apollonian scholasticism of orthodox psychoanalysis, but consciousness embracing and affirming instinctual reality—Dionysian consciousness.
Notes
1 Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939. I, 174.
2 Cf. B. Ghiselin, ed.: The Creative Process. New York: New American Library, 1955. p. 114.
3 B. Russell: Philosophical Essays. London: Longman's, Green, 1910. p. 73.
4 J. G. Frazer: The Golden Bough, abr. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1947. pp. 667-707.
5 F. M. Cornford: Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. pp. 88-127.
6 S. Ferenczi: Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis. Ed. M. Balint, tr. E. Mosbacher and others. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. p. 246.
7 Cf. O. Fenichel: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945. p. 141.
8 Freud: The Ego and the Id (henceforth EI), tr. J. Riviere. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1927. Freud: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. W. J. Sprott. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1933. p. 102.
9 EI, p. 31 and note.
10 EI, 30.
11 Fenichel: Op. Cit. p. 35.
12 Collected Papers (henceforth CP), V, 182. Cf. CP IV, 119.
13 Cf. Ferenczi: Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic Books, 1952. pp. 367-69.
14 CP III, 458.
15 EI, 36.
16 EI, 37.
17 EI, 61-64. Cf. O. Roheim: The Origin and Function of Culture. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs, 1943.
18 EI, 37-38.
19 EI, 36.
20 An Outline of Psychoanalysis (henceworth An Outline), tr. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1949.
21 CP V, 184.
22 Loc. cit.
23 The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. A. A. Brill. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (henceforth BW). New York: The Modern Library, 1938. p. 35; Cf. Ibid., 533.
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24 Three Contributions to the Study of Sex, tr. A. A. Brill. In BW, 614.
25 CP IV, 14, 136.
26 The Interpretaion of Dreams, in BW, 533.
27 Loc. cit.
28 S. Isaacs: The Nature and Function of Phantasy. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., XXIV (1948), 73-79; E. Glover, Examination of the Klein System of Child Psychology. Psychoanal. St. Child, I (1945), 75-118.
29 Isaacs, Op. cit., p. 90.
30 H. Feldman The Illusions of Work. Psychoanal. Rev., XLIV (1955), pp. 262-70.
31 CP III, 584 n.
32 CP IV, 20. Cf. Totem and Taboo, in BW, 874.
33 Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Hogarth, 1930. p. 121. NIL, 114.
34 CP V, 259; ibid, II, 269; Beyond The Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1950. p. 22.
35 F. Bartlett: The Concept of Repression. Science and Society. 18 (1954), pp. 362-39.
36 NIL, 154.
37 CP III, 577.
38 Moses and Monotheism. New York: Knopf, 159.
39 Cf. CP V, 343-44.
40 Ferenczi: Further Contributions, p. 407. CP IV, 136. Cf. G. B. Wilbur: Freud's Life-Death Instinct Theory. American Imago, II (1941), pp. 144, 211.
41 An Outline, 59.
42 Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination. Garden City: Doubleday, 1953. p. 53.
43 W. La Barre: The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
44 An Outline, 74. Cf. CP V, 198-204, 372-75.
45 An Outline, 73-74. CP V, 372-75.
46 Ferenczi: Final Contributions, p. 164.
47 CP IV, 51.
48 Ferenczi: Final Contributions, p. 246; P. Schilder: The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935. p. 136.
49 Ferenczi: Sex in Psychoanalysis, tr. E. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 1952.
50 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In BW, 164.
51 B. Ohiselin, ed.: The Creative Process. p. 119.
52 CP V, 374.
53 The Interpretation of Dreams. In BW, 535.
54 Totem and Taboo. In BW, 856.
55 CP IV, 148; Beyond The Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. tr. A. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1936.
56 A. N. Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan, 1954. p. 289; A. N. Whitehead: Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1927. pp. 64-73.
57 Moses and Monotheism, pp. 178-79.
58 Ferenczi: Sex in Psychoanalysis; p. 275; Ferenczi: Further Contributions, pp. 85, 88-102, 171-72.
59 Cf. G. C. Wilbur: Freud's Life-Death Instinct Theory. American Imago, II (1941), pp. 246-53.
60 A. N. Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas, p. 289.
61 The Ego and the Id, 65. Cf. Wilbur, loc cit., pp. 241-44.
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62 Civilization and Its Discontents, 74-78; CP V, 286. Cf Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture 199-100.
63 Ferenczi: Final Contributions, 246.
64 The Ego and the Id, 80.
65 F. W. Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 1927.
66 F. W. Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 955, 960.
67 J. Hytier: La poétique de Valéry. Paris: Colin, 1953. p. 29.
68 Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche, 956.
69 W. Kaufmann: Nietzsche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. p. 956.
70 W. Kaufmann: Nietzsche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. 247.
71 Cf. W. F. Otto: Dionysos, Mythos and Kultus. Frankfurt Am Main: Klosterman, 1933. pp. 74, 84-85, 95, 124, 159.
72 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 98.
73 Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 958.
74 Isadora Duncan: My Life. New York: Boni and Liveright. p. 105.
75 Ferenczi: Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality. New York: Psychoanal. Q. 1938. p. 16.
76 W. Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; G. F. W. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie. 2d ed. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931. p. 105.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Brown, N.O. (1960). Adventures in Ideas: Apollo and Dionysus. Psychoanal. Rev., 47A:3-23
